Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media report them inadequately. We blog here because our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, New York, Madrid, London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening and why. This ongoing war is killing us.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

18-Oct-12: The Shalit deal a year later - a personal reflection

Whatever it takes: Looking back at the Shalit deal
Arnold Roth, Jerusalem

When the deal to bring
Gilad Shalit home was announced a year ago, three aspects caused a rising sense
of trepidation in my home.

One: the number of Arab
prisoners going free was huge and unprecedented. 1,027 is substantially more
than al-Qaeda’s entire membership at the time of the 9/11 atrocities [source].

Secondly, hundreds of
killers including the woman who had been in our nightmares for years were on
the list.

Three: the terms had been
hammered out with no meaningful attempt to address the concerns of the terrorists’
victims.Gilad was no POW. This
was no conventional prisoner exchange. Kidnapped and held hostage in a dark hole,
he was disconnected from the world for some 2,000 days. We can only guess at
the despair endured by the Shalits.

His captors were dispatched
by Hamas, not an army but a movement defining itself in religious terms. Their
war was never about winning independence or military advantage. The hold they sought
was not over Israel but over their own home base, the Palestinian Arabs. They aimed
to displace the Fatah/PLO camp of PA chief Mahmoud Abbas. Their method was an
audacious act of extortion.

Neither political strategists nor public
figures, my wife Frimet and I wrote and spoke widely in the years before the deal. As parents
of a child murdered by Hamas and part of Israel’s ever-widening circle of
terror victims, we understood that freeing Gilad Shalit raised multiple considerations,
only some of which were being publicly evaluated.

The central message of the Free Shalit
campaign was that Israel must do “whatever it takes” to bring him home. They said
terrorism was basically under control; releasing unrepentant killers would have
little impact on Israel; our side would know how to handle them. Jewish ethics
mandated that you do everything to rescue the hostage; more so when it’s an IDF
soldier. And so on.

These assertions seemed dubious before the
release. With a year’s after-the-fact hindsight, their wrongness is clearer to
us now.

Reality is more nuanced than slogans. The post-Shalit
reality is less bright than deal proponents predicted, but it is not catastrophic.
True, Israel’s internal security agency, the Shabak, and the IDF report steady growth
in terror attacks by Palestinian Arabs on Israelis. September 2012’s terror
statistics show an 80% increase over August. Fifteen Shalit-round releasees have
already been re-arrested by Israel for terror-related activities and are back
behind bars. Support for Hamas in the West Bank has risen appreciably.

An
analytic piece in the influential Haaretz newspaper [source] a day after Gilad Shalit’s release said many
Israelis had under-estimated the price: “Hamas celebrating in the streets of
the West Bank, masses of people vowing to kidnap Israelis, songs of praise of
Hamas' military wing and crowds vowing to continue the jihad until Israel is
destroyed”. Hamas had been saved – by Israel.

Frimet and I did dozens of media interviews during October 2011. We
did not speak against the deal. What we did was to carefully drove the discussion back to our daughter’s
murderer, Ahlam Tamimi. It was imperative she be removed from the go-free list,
we said. We had been arguing this for years [see this 2006 article, one of many].

Why? She
embodies what Hamas markets to its people. A principal engineer of the 2001 Jerusalem
Sbarro restaurant massacre, she selected the target after spying out the area and
personally transported the bomb, both the explosive package and man carrying it
in his guitar case, into Jerusalem that day. She issued final instructions
before the explosion, and then hurried back to Ramallah where she appeared on
camera presenting PA television evening news, smiling demurely as she reported
on a massacre she herself had covertly executed.

Tamimi’s mantra for years has been she has no regrets. The savage
killings were justified. She would (will) happily do it again. She articulately
mocked her prosecutors, asserting she would eventually walk free. If she harboured
doubts about the righteousness of her bloody path, they don’t show.

Since last October, she has traveled extensively in the Arab world
from her base in Jordan. Audiences respond to her appearances with rapture. She
married another unjustly-released, convicted murderer in June, and became the
presenter of a terror-promoting television program beamed throughout the Arabic-speaking
world. She says the freedom handed to her by Israel is a vindication from
heaven. Her toxic message, that killing Jews is right and should be emulated,
has a global megaphone.

Some will view this as a painful but acceptable price; that
getting back our captive soldier trumps other concerns. Others will understand the
deeply subversive effect of Tamimi’s freedom and its connection to the
terrorist attacks now being plotted for future execution. We are in that second
group.

Could the post-Shalit fall-out have been avoided?

Before the
release, it was hard to say, but immediately afterwards there were important revelations.
A freshly-retired senior commander in IDF counter-terrorism
intelligence, Colonel (res.) Ronen Cohen - most recently the intelligence officer of Central Command. said when interviewed on the day Gilad walked free, that this constituted “a resounding failure… The IDF never took
responsibility for the soldier and did not even set up a team to deal with
bringing him back… Intelligence is not passive but must be activated. [In the
Shalit case,] it never was.”

Beyond alternative paths un-taken, there remains the painful matter
of how the victims of the released prisoners were treated. From experience we
know most are neither vindictive nor hate-filled. Citizens expect the state’s institutions
to protect them. The legitimacy of legal systems depends on transparency and
fairness. Judicial decisions and legal sanctions must be meted out ethically,
consistently and justly against those who undermine our society and damage our
lives.

Overturning these core considerations for political reasons causes
damage. The fact is the victims’ voices were devastatingly ignored at all
stages of the Shalit deal at a cost not yet fully tallied. It may yet prove to
be unbearably high.

A modified version of the article above (minus the hyperlinks and under a different title) appears as an op-ed in today's edition of the Australian Jewish News.

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THIS ONGOING WAR is not part of the activity of the Malki Foundation which was founded by us, Frimet and Arnold Roth of Jerusalem, on September 9, 2001. But it is inspired by the same tragic circumstances. The Malki Foundation (also known by its Hebrew name: Keren Malki) is a memorial to the life of our daughter, Malki. She's in the photo below this paragraph. Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in a massacre in the centre of Jerusalem carried out by Hamas.

Beyond its function as a remembrance of a beautiful life, the foundation provides tangible, concrete, invaluable support daily to several thousand Israeli families from every part of the religious and socio-economic spectrum: Christian, Moslem, Jewish, Druze and others who care at home for a seriously disabled child.

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This Ongoing War: About this blog

Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media often report them inadequately. Our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, in New York, in Madrid, in London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening. This ongoing war is killing us.